YMMV / Black & White

• Annoying Video Game Helper: The Guides are sometimes very intrusive in the "help" they provide, particularly when they bash themselves against the screen or natter on at length about obvious topics. Even more annoying, you can fast forward their segments but you can't skip them altogether.
• Breather Level: Land 8 in the sequel can be seen as this, moreso if you're playing Good. The enemy will mostly leave you alone compared to Land 7, and unlike on Land 7, it's very possible to convert the enemy town housing the destructive wonder before it's used on you without having to send your creature to attack it.
• Complete Monster: Both antagonists in the second game commit horrific atrocities to destroy the player god and their people:
  • The Aztec leader is a brutal conqueror who has already brought most of the world under his rule. With the Greeks left as the only opposition against him, he orders their genocide, unleashing his armies to slaughter their citizens and having his creature summon two volcanoes to destroy their cities. Once the Greeks return from the brink, the Aztec leader draws up new plans to exterminate them again, summoning another volcano to decimate the Greek city when they reach the Aztec homeland.
  • Battle of the Gods expansion: The Aztec God, immediately upon being born from prayer, decides to wipe out all life so that the ensuing death can strengthen him. Ravaging the Japanese and Norse homeland, the Aztec God sends his undead army to decimate entire towns and sacrifice villagers to empower himself. When these towns defect to the Greeks, the Aztec God furiously tries to destroy them out of spite. After being initially warded off, the Aztec God taunts the player that his true target were the Greeks, invading their island to exterminate them all.
• Fridge Brilliance: Almost always when you get formal control of the game after all of the tutorials, it might seem odd that you almost always are seen as evil because the town center has a flame. This is because however, an awful lot of mandated actions result in evil, such as you crushing archers with barrels or using flaming bales of hay. As a result, an awful lot of actions that are mandated can often turn you evil, if only very slightly. This means being a good god requires only fighting back if necessary, mandating an attempted Pacifist Run.
• Fridge Horror: The Gods' Playground has a very tiny village consisting of three girls, two boys and two men. If you play there for long enough, you'll eventually have a decent-sized population... who will all be closely related to each other.^note  Not all that bad, really, since that has happened many times in Real Life (all humans are descended from one woman (the Mitochondrial Eve) and one man (the Chromosomal Adam) who lived millennia apart, so there are at least two, "unrelated" cases of one person being the direct ancestor of the entire species.)
• Game-Breaker:
  • Artifacts in the first game. Considering all you have to do is leave villagers to dance around it for a few days, artifacts can trivialize multiple aspects of the game since they can be used to create giganic Wonders and generate belief. Need food or wood? Build a giant Norse Wonder and never see those desire flags again. Pesky creature around your village? Build a giant Greek Wonder and freeze it for thirty minutes. In addition to this, tossing artifacts around and dropping them in villages is an impressive act by itself; it's not rare to see belief gains in the hundreds using a decently sized artifact this way.
  • Thanks to sandbox mode and custom maps explicitly made for training them, player creatures can grow extremely powerful and massive, capable of using every miracle in the game. Often, those maps have several lilac mushrooms (which help creatures grow faster) and miracle dispensers with every miracle in the game, allowing the creature to learn them all without needing a single drop of Prayer Power, including Mega-Blast and its Extreme version.
  • The first game's Red Mushrooms are deadly to AI-controlled gods. Those shrooms can poison an entire village's food supply if dropped in its Village Store, slowly poisoning every villager on it to death. The AI can't distinguish poisoned and untainted food, and will do nothing as their influence falls apart. The worshippers in the god's Temple will be safe from it, but they must return home eventually.
  • The first game also has an exploit that allows you to act far beyond your area of influence.
    • The moment you move your hand out of your territory with something grabbed, pause the game.
    • Move your hand wherever you want to
    • Unpause the game and IMMEDIATELY drop what you're holding.
  • This can be used to drop stuff like food, poisoned food, Artifacts, fireballs and other solid objects deep inside enemy territory. Combining this with the poisoned food makes destroying a god trivial in the long term, as their villages will be free for the taking when their people dies, and their temples will be much easier to destroy.
  • In the second game, punishment spikes. The people don't like having them around, but they increase the productivity of the villagers working in a building for each spike you plop down near it. The buildings that you can increase the productivity of includes epic miracles. It is very plausible for an evil god to completely deprive the enemy of his villagers and soldiers by deploying the Siren once every six or so minutes with only about 30 villagers worshiping it.
  • The Lion creature in the first game (fitting as the dev is Lionhead Studios) is ridiculously good. He's tied with the Wolf, Gorilla, and Leopard for the best strength stat in the game, a speed of 7 which is high-tier, and an intelligence of 7 which is again high-tier. Overall he has the best average of stats of all creatures.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the sequel, holding a burning object over something flammable will set it on fire, even outside the area you can normally influence. This becomes a Game-Breaker if used to destroy enemy buildings and catapults, since there is no defense against it.
  • In both the first and the second game, abusing terrain and the zoom feature at specific places lets you throw anything (rock, person, fireball...) a few thousand miles into the sea.
  • In the first game, if you hold a food or wood miracle over the store and tap it continually it will give you masses more food than if you just hold down the mouse and use it all at once.
  • In the first game, picking up and putting dead villagers through a teleport miracle will bring them back to life, even if they have decayed into skeletons. These undead villagers will have zero health (and will return to their dead state if picked up again), and cannot be healed or made into disciples, but they regain health by sleeping and cannot be killed by conventional means.
  • The first game saved the player and Creature information separately from the game files. If the Creature is in a rough spot in the campaign, you can open a sandbox game and heal it, train it up, help it grow, or teach it all the miracles that it wouldn't normally have access to.
    • This also allowed the player to essentially have a New Game Plus, since if they loaded an early save at any point where they already had their creature, it'll be exactly the same since the file won't be overwritten. It's the only way to use endgame creatures like the Turtle/Wolf/Lion in the first land.
• That One Boss: Black & White Creature Isle brings us Naxo the Rhino, whose trial requires your creature to defeat him in combat. Along with being able to heal himself to full several times, he's capable of using telekenesis to strike your creature from a distance, as well as tossing rocks from outside the arena that deal massive amounts of damage should they collide with your creature.
• That One Level:
  • The third island again. You're shoved on top of a mountain that barely has room for a half-decent village with virtually no supplies save for what you threw in the portal beforehand, plus your creature has been stolen and you have to cross the entire damn island just to get it back. By the time you do, it'll die on the spot and shrink. Moreover, creating supplies via miracles is terribly slow and inefficient, as you no longer have access to the Norse Wonder which supercharges them, plus the forests that are already planted will be picked clean by the rival God if you don't get to the first.
  • Third island nothing, fucking fireball storm. The most effective strategy in Island 4 is invariably "Look up which curse maintains the Firestorm on the Internet and take it out first."
  • All of the Japanese levels in the sequel. The first level has next to no ore, the Japanese will build up a large army, and if you take long enough, they will use a siren wonder. If you think the Creature is gonna help, forget it. Unless you have maxed out the Creature's Soldier tree, and given him a lot of miracles, especially heal, well your creature will repeatedly fall. The second level has you under endless attack and one achievement mandates only attacking at night, and the Japanese creature can easily beat yours. The final level has the Japanese attack you non stop, and they will make use of their wonder.
• That One Sidequest:
  • "The Shaolin" is a Stealth-Based Mission... for a deity who manifests as a gigantic Spark Fairy. The low margin of error to tail the titular Hermit Guru undetected, combined with cumbersome camera controls, all but guarantee many, many failed attempts.
  • Many lands in the sequel have one Quest that is extremely tedious, with the tribute reward being miniscule compared to the time and effort required to complete the quest.
    • Land three quest is clicking on every Tutorial sign on the map. This will quicky devolve into a hunt for the last lousy signpost.
    • Land four requires you to deforest the land. Meaning you have to remove every single tree on the map. However, the quest doesn't specify that the trees have to be completely destroyed. Uprooting them and throwing them into sea won't work, and will actually make completing the quest impossible, since the sea counts as part of the map and you can't destroy the trees at the bottom of the sea.
    • The quest in Land five will task you with killing every living thing. That includes trees, all humans and all the animals. You'll have to purge the land completely, alignment notwhistanding.
    • Land six quest will require you to segragate men and women into different towns.

---